De Gaulle’s lonely predictions

par Alexis Berg et
Dominique Vidal,
juin 2007

The evening paper France-Soir ran the headline “Egypt attacks Israel” on 5 June 1967, although when it went to press it was clear Israel had launched the attack by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. That was the start of the preemptive war that allowed Israel to quadruple its territory by occupying the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The headline was so obviously untrue that the second edition read instead “War in the Middle East”. The example was extreme, yet typical of the attitude of the French media to the Six Day war. The defence of Israel was an end that justified anything, leading to outright manipulation of the news.

Before the war the press had claimed that the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was intent on annihilating Israel (see “1967 : a war of miscalculation and misjudgment”). Even the satirical Le Canard Enchaîné ran a story on 31 May, “Towards a final solution to the problem of Israel” which read : “The Ra’is [the Egyptian leader, aka Führer] has solemnly declared to the world press that if Israel so much as raises a finger it will be totally destroyed, although he did not state by which means. Gas ovens perhaps ?”

Despite the Israeli offensive the media accused the Arab world of warmongering. On 6 June the socialist paper Le Populaire claimed : “Israel is successfully resisting attacks on all sides.” When the war was over references to defence justified all Israeli conquests. On 8 June Combat rejoiced in the “marvellous outcome for the Israeli army” : on the same day Yves Cuau wrote in Le Figaro : “It appears tonight that the Jewish army has achieved the greatest of victories. Never before has a dictator taken such a beating.”

This misrepresentation affected public opinion, and support for Israel grew throughout the crisis and the war. Thousands of protesters marched in Paris and other French cities, joined by leading politicians with the exception of the communists and the far left. Paris-Jour congratulated the 50,000 fans who attended the pro-Israel pop concert with star Johnny Hallyday (recently guest of honour at Sarkozy’s election victory show) while L’Aurore lauded the “impressive display of support to a nation under threat”.

The French Committee for Solidarity with Israel published appeals in newspapers and gathered signatures from personalities such as Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret as well as politicians including Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand. A separate petition launched by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, signed by most of the leftwing artists and intellectuals, was also a huge success. But in an article in Le Monde on 14 June, the sociologist Maurice Duverger observed : “The enthusiasm with which the majority of French people have rallied to the Israeli cause has put the French Communist party in a difficult position, even in relation to its own supporters.”

It was not easy for President de Gaulle to make himself heard. “France will not give its approval to – and still less support – the first nation to use weapons,” he had said in a cabinet meeting on 2 June. True to his word, he imposed an arms embargo on both sides. Months later de Gaulle said : “Israel is organising an occupation of the territories it has captured, which can only result in oppression, repression and expulsion, and there is resistance in those territories that Israel is calling terrorist.” Yet the only line of that speech people remembered was a controversial statement about the Jews being “sure of themselves and domineering”.

With hindsight, de Gaulle’s analysis was prophetic, but at the time it shocked the French establishment. On 7 June the weekly Nouvel Observateur demanded to know “why de Gaulle has dropped Israel” and deplored the fact that “Gaullist France does not have friends, only interests”. De Gaulle had broken with 20 years of unconditional support for Israel during which France allowed it to obtain first the A-bomb and then the H-bomb. To some de Gaulle’s attitude was an affront to legitimate guilty feelings about the Vichy government’s active participation in the genocide of the Jews, while others, nostalgic for colonial French Algeria, felt deprived of a revenge on “the Arabs”.

Not until the invasion of Lebanon and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, followed by the first intifada of 1987, did the French begin to distance themselves from Israeli policy and call for the creation of an independent Palestinian state beside Israel, with East Jerusalem as its capital. French presidents led the way : de Gaulle’s successors, from Georges Pompidou to Jacques Chirac, all adopted his Middle Eastern policy. Will Nicolas Sarkozy now follow suit ?

The word Palestinian was notable by its absence in all the accounts of 1967, with the exception of the communist and far-left press and the Catholic paper Témoignage Chrétien. France was oblivious of the main victims of the war that completed the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 and even of their name.